Penghello, everyone,
We’ve been continuously reviewing the feedback and suggestions you’ve shared with us since PengPong’s launch. Recently, we’ve received a lot of comments in particular about the difficulty scaling in Endless Mode and the balance of several items.
After reviewing both actual gameplay data and your feedback, we concluded that some of our previous balance changes were too conservative, and that Endless Mode was becoming difficult in ways that did not fully match our original intentions.
As a result, we have reverted some item changes and made broader adjustments to the difficulty scaling in Endless Mode.
Item Balance Readjustments
We have buffed several items that were adjusted in the previous update.
Piggy Bank: Removed the restriction that prevented its effect from working in Endless Mode.
Emergency Blood Pack: Increased the chance to drop a Heart when taking damage from 25% → 40%.
Restock Request Form: Restored the number of additional shop rerolls from 1 → 2.
Golden Dice: Removed the maximum gold limit per battle for gold earned by defeating enemies with critical hits.
While it is important to keep the game’s economy and overall balance stable, we also believe it is important not to overly restrict the fun of finding powerful items and building a stronger setup.
We will continue to monitor gameplay data while also taking the overall player experience into account as we make future updates.
Endless Mode Balance Adjustments
Endless Mode is intended to become progressively more difficult as you advance. However, under the previous system, enemy movement speed increased too aggressively, while the actual risk faced by the player did not increase as naturally.
Rather than simply making enemies excessively fast, we felt that gradually increasing the damage players take would create a more appropriate sense of tension for Endless Mode.
As a result, enemy movement speed will no longer scale with progression, while enemy damage will gradually increase instead.
In Endless Mode, enemy damage now increases by half a Heart every 10 waves.
Removed enemy movement speed scaling in Endless Mode.
Slightly increased the appearance rate of the Devil Shop in both normal battles and Endless Mode.
With these changes, our goal is to reduce the frustration of enemies feeling excessively fast or overwhelming in the later stages of Endless Mode, while still increasing the risk of mistakes as a run continues.
Together with the previously fixed issues related to revival invincibility and Endless Mode, we will continue adjusting the mode so that its difficulty scales in a more natural and satisfying way.
Bug Fixes & Other Changes
Improved frame drops that occurred when large numbers of enemies and effects accumulated in Endless Mode.
Fixed an issue where insufficient spacing in the story illustration screen caused some text to overlap.
Fixed an issue where the effect for the Clown Box was incorrectly displayed in white.
That’s all for this update.
Since launch, far more players than we expected have been enjoying PengPong in many different ways, and as a result, we continue to receive reports about issues we had not discovered ourselves, along with many new ideas and suggestions.
When it comes to balance, we believe it is more important than simply raising or lowering numbers. Our goal is to preserve the satisfaction of becoming stronger while still maintaining a meaningful sense of challenge. This update is another step in that process.
We are continuing to review all bug reports, balance feedback, and new ideas shared through the Steam forums and Discord. If there is anything you notice while playing, please feel free to let us know at any time.
We’ll keep working to make PengPong even more fun.
Thank you!